The Fifth Child

With the unsuccessful expulsion of Ben, David’s threat of “him or us” becomes reality. Harriet’s initial dream of a home filled with joyful children becomes a house where neither her husband nor the other children want to remain and where relatives avoid visiting. Instead, a different set of youths inhabit the house. Ben’s peers represent the archetype of the unwelcome guest, introducing violence and disregard into the “fortress” that Harriet had once hoped to build. Yet, as several literary critics have noted, their presence also forces Harriet to confront society’s struggles with crime, class disparity, unemployment, sexual assault, racism, anti-immigration policies, and the political and social turmoil of 1980s Britain after Thatcher and the Conservative government made cuts to public services like health, education, and housing. Harriet may be a stranger in her own home, but she can no longer be a stranger to her nation.

Ben falls in with an “alienated, non-comprehending, hostile tribe” of youths who also do not fit in with the ideal of the model citizen (129). Harriet describes them as “gangly, spotty, uncertain adolescents” who were “poor children, who stayed together because they were found stupid, awkward, and unable to match up to their contemporaries” (121). The passive-voice phrase “they were found,” which purposefully does not indicate who did the finding, points to stereotypes of “disaffected youths” as delinquents, vagrants, and criminals who are “born” this way and not a product of institutional and systemic structures. Harriet catches herself scapegoating the group: “Now, whenever she heard of a break-in, or a mugging, or a rape anywhere, she blamed them; but thought she was unjust. They could not be blamed for everything!” (128). Harriet begins the novella as a cultural conservative who distances herself from “social ills,” but when she is repeatedly implicated as the source of Ben’s “monstrosity,” the novella explores who defines The Social Construction of Normality and Otherness.

Because of Harriet’s allegiance to Ben, she is relegated to the realm of the “other” with him. Harriet, like Ben, is blamed for the dissolution of the family, and the relatives call her epithets like “irresponsible Harriet, selfish Harriet, crazy Harriet” (117). Despite devoting herself to raising Ben, Harriet is characterized as a bad mother and wife who forsakes her husband and “healthy” children for the undeserving offspring. The novella addresses Exposing the Myth of the Ideal Family in the isolation and blame that Harriet experiences for not upholding society’s unrealistic expectation that she, and she alone, be responsible for maintaining a happy home. Harriet becomes “[a] scapegoat. She [i]s the scapegoat—Harriet, the destroyer of her family” (117), a term that Harriet also applies to “Ben, the alien, the destroyer” (130). Mother and child mirror each other in their shared status as outcasts who do not comply with sexist and ableist assumptions of normality. Harriet finds her ostracism even more hypocritical when she is made to feel “like a criminal” for preventing Ben’s murder (104).

Ben never experiences his house as an idyllic home with genuine acceptance and reintegration. Instead, Harriet hires John to ensure that Ben is never physically in the house for long. Moreover, Harriet disciplines Ben with sedation, confinement, and the threat of abandonment. By contrast, John and his friends become a found family that teaches Ben by talking to him about his body’s strength and its consequences. These two adults are the only ones to significantly interact with Ben; their opposing approaches are represented by the contrast in the vehicles associated with them. Harriet repeatedly threatens to call the van, the small black vehicle where he was locked in and torn from his family screaming, while John takes Ben on his motorbike, a vehicle that represents freedom, mobility, and friendship.

Toward the end of the novella, Harriet proposes a new interpretation of Ben as an evolutionary “throwback”; Lessing also referred to the character as a “genetic throwback” (“Doris Lessing’s Unfinished Business With ‘Ben in the World.’” YouTube, uploaded by PBS NewsHour, 11 Nov. 2013). For some readers, the theory is a problematic reference to the racism and ableism of eugenics. Ben’s violent and antisocial behavior is credited to an atavistic gene that is expressed in the modern world, but this explanation aligns with racist discourse that posits a hierarchy of “primitive” or “savage” races that are born criminal because they have not “evolved.” For other readers, Lessing’s novella offers a direct critique of such pseudoscience and demonstrates how nurture and not nature is what constructs Ben into a “monster.” A product of his environment, Ben becomes the object of fear, hatred, and repulsion; his acts of violence mirror the brutality of his family’s rejection. Ben thus represents the violence and cruelty inherent in every human.

The ambiguity of Ben’s identity and Harriet’s inability to see into his conscience reflects Harriet’s own hazy motivations. As much as she wonders what Ben thinks of her, her sentiments about her child shift from resentment to pity and back again, illustrating Ambivalence About Motherhood and Female Self-Sacrifice. Harriet’s duality is literalized in the final scene of her regarding her reflection in the table, much like the reflection of the magic girl in the pool from David’s story. Readers are not given a clear picture of whether Harriet devotes herself to Ben out of maternal duty, guilt, a desire to redeem her reputation, an obstinate refusal to give up on her dream of the perfect family, or, perhaps the least likely, love. Ben is never human to her; the novella asks whether Ben is as impossible to accept and as alien as Harriet and her family insist.